TIME AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

With the increasing commodification of
time
and given competitive capitalism's production of "winners" and
"losers," it should come as no surprise that time as well as
wealth has become thoroughly and invidiously stratified.

To occupy different positions in the social hierarchy is to have
different temporal orientations to everyday life. This involves such matters
as:

orientations to the past, present, and future. For instance, Harvard
Professor Jonathan Mann, director of the Bagnoud Center for Health and
Human Rights (quoted in the Boston Globe, June 22, 1994), observed "If
you want an inner-city African-American kid in this country to use a condom,
you have to give him a future."

rates of social mobility. For structural reasons, one's control
over mobility diminishes during the middle years of life and often one
realizes that any further upward climb in an organizational hierarchy is
no longer a function of personal effort but rather of job vacancies. The
timing and awareness of mobility running out is a function of social class:
the higher one's social standing the more likely one's role "peakings"
are postponed (the later one graduates from school, the later the end of
upward mobility, "job burnouts," retirement, etc.)

waiting times. The lower one's social status the longer one waits,
whether in unemployment lines or in physicians' offices.

temporal flexibility. In a 1988 study of office workers commissioned
by the International Council of Shopping Centers, 38 percent said they
go shopping during the work day. Upper-level managers are the most likely
to shop during non-lunch hours.

THE TEMPORAL WORLDS
OF SOCIAL CLASSES

When passing through one of the most affluent areas of my city while
on my way to work I noticed a milk truck parked in front of one of the
mansions. Upon seeing a milkman returning to his van with a load of empty
milk bottles I was struck by childhood memories of when this now-rare morning
ritual was routinely conducted in my own middle class neighborhood.

There's little question for why this disappearance of milk trucks
from Levittowns. Inflation of fuel prices, the aging of the baby-boom (whose
childhood made such rounds cost-efficient as nearly everyone in the 'burbs
had children), the proliferation of supermarkets and the sprouting of convenience
stores have all contributed to the obsolescence of the milkman. And yet,
here he still is in the 1990s. Among the upper classes, individuals can
still afford to maintain such traditional life-styles, including keeping
mom at home. It is in the working class that individuals are most susceptible
to the broad currents of social change. Here the dual-career and single-parent
family roles were first trailblazed, long before it became fashionable
for a yuppie couple to leave in their his and her BMWs to their separate
professions. The ability to live in or own the past has, for the upper
middle class and their highers, become an important dimension of conspicuous
consumption.

Times of the Upper Class

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking
they hit a triple.
--Barry Switzer

When you think about, there are some intriguing temporal underpinnings
to the status claims of the upper class. A universal tactic for convincing
others that their place is at a lower rung of the stratification order
than yourself and therefore owe special deference to oneself is to establish
one's legitimacy through lineage. You have an ancestor who was a passenger
on the Mayflower? who fought in the American Revolutionary War? who was
one of the founding settlers in your state or your community? You are in
luck-- especially if your family has maintained its presence and "good
name," and if you are in a place where tradition and continuity are
valued. Take the richest woman in the world, Queen Elizabeth: the entire
British monarchy depends her being able to point to a 56- generation lineage.

Now, with your genealogy chart and supporting evidence in order,
you are ready to lay claim to your rightful membership to some of society's
most exclusive clubs and organizations. The community, of course, must
be periodically reminded of your special status. You may, for instance,
have publicized rites of passage for your brood, such as a debutante celebration.
And it helps to be part of your community's historical preservation movement;
your ancestor's deeds need to remain part of the public consciousness.
A new street needs naming? Let's label it after great-great-great grandpa
Throckmorton.

GENDER TIMES

The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo;
hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

During one cold November week in 1795, Martha Bullard of Hallowell,
Maine, listed among her household chores: brewing beer, nursing a sick
cow and scouring 35 skeins of wool in preparation for weaving. "A
woman's work is never done, as the song says," she wrote in her diary
that week. "And happy she whose strength holds out to the end of the
days."

In addition to age-stratification, the only other cultural universal
by which social roles are allocated is on the basis of gender. Numerous
are the temporal strategies for keeping women in their place. The female
role has, across cultures and history, been generally characterized by
its greater temporal demands, greater age discriminations, and by having
to perform a greater number of rituals of temporal deference (e.g., being
typically being younger than one's spouse).

the men are willing to let women get ahead, but only if
women still do all the housework at home

57%

39%

60%

38%

the women's movement has made things harder for men at
home

53%

55%

59%

65%

THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF
AGING

In the Fall of 1996, "The First Wives Club" was
packing women into theaters across the country. The movie pushed a common
button: aging males trading in their first wives for younger trophy brides.

Why are men allowed to age without penalty while women must look
young and lie about their age or risk disqualification from the sexual
and marriage markets? Throughout the animal kingdom, the female is the
longer-lived sex and yet for years the U.S. Department of Labor labeled
women as "old" at age 35 and males "old" at 45?

Women's History Month. Out of the educational efforts of the California-based
National Women's History Project, National Women's History Week was proclaimed
in 1981 to coincide with International Women's Day, March 8. Six years
later, Congress set aside the whole month to celebrate the remarkable stories
and significant achievements of women.

RACIAL
TIMES

Over fifty years ago Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal argued in An
American Dilemma that the problem of race in the United States cut
to the very core of our definition as a people. Though founded on the ideals
of individual liberty and personal dignity, he saw that we could not, through
law or social practice, treat the descendants of slaves as the equals of
whites. But, in 1944, he could hardly have foreseen what would happen.
Between 1889 and 1918, the NAACP reported that 3,224 black men and women
had been lynched. Even three decades ago, Ronald Reagan opposed the 1964
Civil Rights Act.

In the early 1960s there was, among African Americans, the sense
of time running out for Jim Crow (much like the sense of time running out
for apartheid in South Africa). In 1961, ABC television presented a documentary
that presents the blacks' point of view. It tells of black impatience--not
a popular topic in some quarters of the South. Some boycotted the show's
sponsor, Bell & Howe. In Louisiana, schools were prohibited from buying
its products. A few years later, NBC had to cancel the "Nat King Cole
Show" because sponsors would not pay for blacks on TV.

In 1976, Kentucky ratified the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.
Since 1980, we've seen the first black Miss America and the first black
astronaut. In 1994 marked the 30th anniversary of LBJ's signing of the
Civil Rights Act. This opened public accommodations to all, began school
desegregation, institutionalized equal employment opportunities, and extended
voting rights to all. The South of the early sixties is now as remote as
the antebellum South.

Histories of the African American Experience

Certainly
one acknowledgement of the history of a people is to have their memories
affixed on a postage stamp. It was not until 1940, with the issuance of
a Booker T. Washington stamp, that the United States first so honored an
African American. Since that time, 56 black Americans have been so commemorated.